Zelensky has ...
His best option...
so that he can ...
so that Zelensky can...
so that Zelensky can have more...
It's astonishing the level of dishonesty that goes into writing a paragraph like this.
It's not Zelensky doing this. If Zelensky negotiated a surrender to Russia right now, the Ukrainian people would toss his ass to the curb and probably kill him for it.
laxam
7mo ago
Now, we're probably going to disagree on the fundamentals on who's smart or not, but going to the bench - the thing people miss is much of the current Democratic bench is in the states - Whitmer in Michigan in the same state Biden barely won, wins by ten, and also turns the Michigan legislature entirely blue for the first time in decades, Shapiro in PA wins by a landslide, Pritzer in Illinois's a little more controversial but you beat a bad billionaire with a good class traitorous billionaire, there's Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina who has won two terms in a light-red state, while running as a standard issue liberal, Andy Beshear in Kentucky is a pro-choice and pro-LGBT Governor of that state about to win reelection, Tim Walz has been a solid governor of Minnesota, and for more well-known folks, there's Newsom in Cali, and for the more moderates/neoliberals, Polis in CO. In the Senate, even then, there's Raphael Warnock, a pretty down-the-line liberal Senator who won in Georgia.
Most of those people won because their opponent sucked. Some of them even got to choose their opponent, like Pritzker.
I don't think any of these people could get serious traction nationally, except maybe Shapiro or Newsom (and Newsom has some hard caps nationally). The rest would be running, at best, as 'Generic Democrat'.
laxam
7mo ago
Was that before or after they were told how to think about it by the authorities and who the object of their ire should be, at times on completely false pretenses?
I don't know if you're old enough to remember that day, but...before. Absolutely 100% before.
Just because you have a nice, coherent model of how society works that fits neatly in your head, that doesn't mean your model is correct.
laxam
7mo ago
Ah so he has no option to negotiate?
He can try, but he's significantly more constrained by internal Ukrainian politics than you seem to think he is.
laxam
7mo ago
If by the "Ukrainian people" you mean the people in charge behind Biden and Zelensky.
No, I mean the people who threw out and would have killed another leader they were unhappy with if he hadn't gotten away less than a decade ago
laxam
7mo ago
People wanted to know who was responsible the day of.
Unfortunately we can't test that. But the reason I believe in my model is that things as shocking as 9/11 I've seen happen elsewhere in countries where a war on terror wasn't in the interests of the ruling class, and those somehow failed to materialize the will for such a thing despite clearly fertile ground.
Most other countries cannot do what the US did.
laxam
7mo ago
I continue to be unsure of how much you remember, but the invasion of Iraq took place almost two years after 9/11, with a lot of focus on things other than that event to justify the invasion to the people, like WMDs.
The invasion of Afghanistan took place a month after 9/11 and that absolutely was an expression of outrage by the country.
laxam
7mo ago
I mean, one reason they chose Zelensky in the first place was because they were 'voting harder' to prevent corruption, a platform he ran on. That seems to be pretty close to how countries with more entrenched democratic institutions do it, too: the voters vote for something and it's not always clear if they'll get it, but they try anyway.
laxam
7mo ago
That's a historical path dependency thing and you can tell because of the way the working class majority has moved away from Marxism.
The working class was attracted to left wing parties of all sorts in the 19th century. Over the course of that century and into the 20th, Marxism slowly won an internal power struggle amongst the left wing parties and factions of many countries. Even those which maintained a non-Marxist policy bent often adopted Marxist language and trappings (if only formally -- see: the Social Democratic parties in Scandinavia, who were never interested in actually going through with a Marxist revolution but often put Marxist goals in their platforms early on).
As the Cold War heated up, this started to drop away. Social Democrats started to explicitly and consciously disassociate from Marxism, many transformed over time into more or less social liberal, welfare capitalist parties as the big state post-war consensus fell apart, and now much of their voting base has switched sides to right-wing or conservative populist parties.
laxam
6mo ago
The small group of GOP representatives were able to get concessions which should end the Dictator Speaker Era as well as the Omnibus/Continuing Resolution Era from McCarthy in exchange for McCarthy getting the gavel. Appropriations must be passed through the normal process which means 12 appropriations bills produced by the 12 committees through the normal process and are brought to the floor before the statutory deadline which means no more omnibus bills and no more continuing resolutions. And there were many other smaller concessions. McCarthy broke his promises and used Democrats to do it. The small group revolted and that was the end of McCarthy's speakership.
It's important to note that this small group was intentionally making it impossible for McCarthy to keep his promise. He was going forward with regular order, the Appropriations committee and relevant subcommittees had reported their bills already by mid-July, but Freedom Caucus holdouts spiked rules votes to begin floor debate on those bills time and time again.
The whole situation was engineered by a group that got to get their names in the headlines off of it. They wanted him to break his promises because then they got to fundraise off of being the scrappy freedom fighters against the duplicitous Establishment. But, by forcing a delay, they put McCarthy in a situation where he had to choose between a shutdown and a CR.
Just like the Left, the Recalcitrants in Congress depend on people being underinformed about how a complex process works so they gin up a self serving narrative.
All twelve bills could have been passed by early August and a unified Republican Conference could have fought a very public and very righteous fiscally conservative battle against Democrats in the Senate and White House through the end of September, boosting their credibility as a serious party of responsible government without risking a shutdown. Instead, they're embarrassing the party and all but guaranteeing the Democrats regain the House next year, all so Matt Gaetz can send out fundraising emails while he votes to kick his own party out of power.
laxam
6mo ago
Well, what I'm really doing is underrating the diversity of opinion among the Recalcitrants. Chip Roy, although not one of the defenestrators, has consistently been among the recalcitrants on advancing budget bills, but I trust him to be doing what he does for the reasons he says and he would probably have been fine with a shutdown if the budget didn't come out the way he wanted. Gaetz was doing it for attention and fundraising, he thinks he's going to become the next Governor of Florida off of this. Some of the others wanted a shutdown because they seem to think hardball negotiating will get them what they want ( I think Andy Biggs is in this category).
Others may have their own reasons.
laxam
6mo ago
As Scott Greer would say, these fans are economically upper-class economically but who enjoy low-class activities (at least, as defined by our cultural elites). Yet is the tailgating culture truly low-class? The catered food at many tailgates is provided by top restaurants, there is typically at least one very nice liquor, and the cigars were ubiquitous following the victory. I saw an Audi R8, tricked-out trucks costing upwards of six figures, and campers that cost the equivalent of a small lakehouse. In addition, these are people who simply know how to have fun, and do so with enthusiasm and no excuses. There is self-awareness but no navel-gazing. These are people who know who they are and take pride in it.
There's an element of the old classlessness to American culture that haunts some places still. Especially places where the local whites have roots stretching into the antebellum era, there is a cultural memory of a time when people at least took the idea that America shouldn't have social classes seriously, even it wasn't an idea that entirely panned out in practice. If you're middle class, you enjoy low class entertainment as almost a point of pride.
laxam
6mo ago
Why does Twitter cost money? It's just other people providing content...
The irony of trying to own Elon on Twitter costs when he successfully ruthlessly shrank a huge amount of bloat there.
laxam
6mo ago
The nature of federal and state funding for Indians as determined by tribe as determined (in many cases) by blood as a kind of reparations (explicitly or implicitly)
A gift-giving, paternal relationship between European/American settler states and native states is a lot older than any sense of white guilt. The US government, for example, has been making at least periodic payments to Indian tribes since the 1790s.
I don't know if I'd call it reparations. This is a traditional form of interaction between the new states and the tribes, including between states and tribes that otherwise had no real relationship.
The Trump era has been a historic disaster for the Republican Party downballot. After fighting and clawing it's way into centuriate power during the Tea Party era, reaching a peak of state and local power in 2016 unmatched since the 1920s, the anti-Trump backlash drove them out of power everywhere in 2018 and 2019.
They have the luck that the Democrats really suck at not just assuming they will hold power forever, so driving yet more backlash, but people in many places would rather have Democratic leftists over Trumpist conspiracy theorists (even if that is a near run thing).
The fact that the crazies have gained local party power in a lot of places is going to be a hobble on the party's performance for a long time. Arizona -- what is probably still a light red state in natural circumstances -- is probably going to be become blue just because the AZGOP is nuts.
My local party has stayed mostly sane, thankfully, so hopefully we can finish pushing the Democrats who won county control for the first time in half a century back into minority status. We'll see.
laxam
6mo ago
I understand the logic that we have a tow party system, and in 'safe' districts a majority is always going to vote for whoever their party puts on the ballot, so that's the 'real' election in these districts.
This isn't even the way it has to work. Prior to the rise of the partisan primary, local party organizations tailored themselves to local conditions. That should be the way it still works. John Bel Edwards, the Democratic governor of Louisiana, is a very conservative Democrat, probably the most conservative elected Democrat in the country by a decent clip. There should be more Democrats like that in conservative areas. Phil Scott is a very popular Republican governor of Vermont. There should be more Republicans like him for Vermonters.
Primaries nationalize local elections, which creates single party localities.
laxam
6mo ago
The idea that the parties themselves should be Democratic organizations is itself a Progressive idea. They did fine for a long time functioning as deliberative, member organizations which we're focused on winning general, rather than primary elections.
laxam
6mo ago
For the most part, the problem isn't a policy agenda problem (in fact, on these issues -- crime, immigration, education -- have a polling advantage), it's a temperament and presentment problem.
laxam
6mo ago
This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".
Subsets of aggregate data can move in different directions from the summary statistics of the whole dataset. Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.
And stuff like this:
- Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House.
Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).
What's actually going on here is that the chattering classes and the politicians and bureaucrats they support are finding, once again, that they can't actually tell people what to think about their personal lives. It's baldly obvious that this group doesn't actually know what they're talking about any functionally better than most people and that their ability to cite macro statistics is more an attempt to cast a magic spell than a real explanation of ground truth.
laxam
6mo ago
Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.
Which averages matter a lot.
Of course, there is no real policy discussion going on with these discussions of macro statistics. It's just Lefty professionals sneering at the rest of the country and saying, "Why won't you just do what I tell you and vote for the Democrats?"
laxam
6mo ago
Very few of these sneers are coming from the BEA or BLS directly, who mostly are just grinding out the incredible work they have always done (along with all the other statistical agencies in the Federal government), and whose feet I worship at.
But the sneers themselves remain dumb. They come from the ideologically incurious. The puffed up underinformed. The boys at the BLS know that the sub-aggregates matter, too, that's why they do stuff like break things down by industry, region, or state. But the commentariat just knows the national macro aggregates look good, so why won't the deplorable love Biden? He's an on old white guy, isn't he? They love that shit.
laxam
6mo ago
There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".
Perhaps you might have saved yourself a lot of words had you considered, "Maybe I'm wrong about the actual state of things for many people", and, "The economic data are accurate within the gamut of what they're actually measuring", aren't mutually exclusive things.
laxam
6mo ago
Not a problem. It may have behooved me to be explicit with where my concerns lay. I have respect verging on awe for the amount of statistics various branches of the Federal government collect and release to the public.
No shit. They need cash and weapons now, not the support of internet contrarians who will always hate them because they had the audacity to be invaded by the Russians.
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